Over the last four days, Elon Musk has spoken out more than 50 times about President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — and the comments have been far from flattering.

“Shame on Dictator Maduro,” Musk wrote on X on Sunday, as results came in from Venezuela’s presidential election, which has been criticised as deeply flawed. The next morning, Musk posted that there had been “major election fraud by Maduro”. Since then, the world’s richest man has also compared Maduro to a donkey and suggested that he would be open to fighting the autocratic leader in hand-to-hand combat.

Musk, the 53-year-old chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, has often criticised heads of state, including President Joe Biden, on X. But the attacks against Maduro, who is one of the prominent symbols of the Left in Latin America, stood out for their sudden volume and aggression.

They were part of a pattern by Musk of denouncing Leftist ideals and socialism. In Venezuela, he has said, he sees a failed state with a collapsed economy that he blames on the corruption of Leftist politicians. In some of his posts, Musk, who has endorsed former President Donald J. Trump in the US presidential race, suggested that the US could become like Venezuela if voters backed the Democratic Party in November.

In effect, Musk is using the firestorm over Venezuela’s election to reinforce his worldview that Socialist and Leftist forces are degrading global society, said Eugenia Mitchelstein, an associate professor at the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires. Musk appears to have posted only once about Venezuelan politics before Sunday, she said, and is using the questions over the country’s election to “score very easy political points”.

Musk could prove a useful foil for Maduro as the Venezuelan leader seeks to divert the focus from his opponents’ claims of electoral fraud. Maduro has publicly challenged Musk to a fight, calling him his “archenemy”.

“Do you want a fight? Let’s go for it, Elon Musk,” Maduro said on national television on Tuesday. “As we say here: If you want it, I want it.”

Musk, who said in the past that he would engage in physical combat against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mark Zuckerberg, responded on Wednesday on X. (He has not followed through on holding the fights.)

“I accept,” Musk said. If Maduro loses, he added, the “dictator” will have to resign.

New York Times News Service